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Also, not long after the shift from command line to IDEs, development tools moved off onto another plane, "which was development as a team sport," Booch said.
Then with the message of development as a team sport, "weve begun to see trends toward CDEs." Booch said he most clearly saw the benefits of a CDE while working on a classified government "engagement," where he was able to peer through a browser and see all the artifacts the team had been working with and could communicate with the developers via the system.

"A lot of the problems that face us in software development are not technical but human," Booch said. "We have instant messaging, we have Web meetings, and we have software like [Lotus] Sametime. There may be something here we can add to IDEs and to software development in general, like provide social graces for instant messaging or for awareness of presence. Whats missing is bolting those things together."

Economic forces are driving these changes, Booch said. "We have to deal with teams of teams [of developers] and outsourcing is a reality," he said. "CDEs represent a means to extending development."
Booch said the computer-aided design space has managed to include many collaborative features into its software.
"Whats so exciting is with Eclipse being an open-standard IDE we can base a lot of our work on it," as IBM takes its tools forward, he said.
"CDEs represent not so much a revolutionary thing, but its the blooming of 1,000 flowers," Booch said. "The time is now because the products have aligned in so many ways," including IBMs WebSphere, Rational, Lotus and Tivoli product lines, as well as the open-source Eclipse platform.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.